Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Monday, July 1, 2013

The Conservative Founding Fathers Who Saved America

By Alan
Caruba

On the
Fourth of July it is traditional and proper that we pay tribute to the nation’s
Founding Fathers. The names of Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Madison are
well known to Americans, but far less of the names of the conservative founders
who, in many ways, saved and created the nation through their efforts and
sacrifices.

They
include Robert Morris, Gouveneur Morris, John and Edward Routledge, James
Wilson, Philip Schuyler, and John Dickerson. Their achievements have been
mentioned in passing by many historians, but it took David Lefer to do them the
full justice they deserve in his new book, “The Founding Conservatives: How a
Group of Unsung Heroes Saved the American Revolution.”

For
conservatives today, it is testimony to the tenacity, fortitude, and sacrifice
these men demonstrated during the long years of the Revolution and it is also
the story of the way the colonies, later states, often failed to meet their
obligations to fund the soldiers who fought for freedom from England, often
suffering horribly at Valley Forge and elsewhere. When the fighting ceased,
they just as often found themselves without pay or pension.

From the
Declaration of Independence in 1776, to the peace treaty in 1783, to the
ratification of the Constitution in 1788, and the inclusion of the Bill of
Rights in 1791, Lever notes that “The Revolution was a time of war without end;
of real estate crashes, rampant speculation, and mounting public debt; of
popular outrage at bankers and merchants who grew rich while the rest of the
nation struggled; of bitter disputes over taxation; and of such animosity
between left and right that it left Congress paralyzed for months on end.”

In short,
times not unlike our own today.

In the
years following World War II, historians of that time “made a conscious
decision to downplay any hint of strife among the Founding Fathers”, but the
reality can be found in Lefer’s book and it is far from what a generation or
two of Americans were taught. America’s economy was based largely on
agriculture, but it was the conservative Founders who were the first advocates
of a banking system, corporations, and large-scale industry. It was the
conservatives who set in motion the rise of America.

Today it
is fashionable among liberals to depict the Founding Fathers as slave-owners
and many were in an era where their labor was needed, but many of the
conservatives chose to free their slaves after the nation was established.

Of the men
mentioned above, all could be considered the “elite”, wealthy men who
nonetheless risked their wealth and their lives in the cause of establishing a new nation
and, indeed, many lost everything as they risked the investments in a wide
range of land speculation and other enterprises.

At the
heart of their endeavors was the 17th and 18th century
concept of virtue which was very different from how we interpret it today. “It
implied manliness as well as selflessness, an ability to fight for the state,
and a willingness to place its interests about one’s own.” None perhaps
exemplified this better than George Washington whose tenacity kept together the
ill-clothed and fed army that ultimately defeated the most powerful empire of
its time.

The
Founding Fathers were extremely distrustful of the concentration of power as
was seen in the concept of monarchy and today Americans are distrustful of a
government whose powers of surveillance and thus control are seen in the
revelations about the role of the National Security Agency, the Internal
Revenue Service, and the Department of Homeland Security. Most particularly,
Americans fear a presidency that ignores the Constitution and Congress,
preferring to rule by executive orders.

By April
19, 1775, “the stench of gunpowder and dead men filled the air between Boston
and Concord” and soon enough the Second Continental Congress “which met for the
first time three weeks later, found itself in charge of a war it had not
authorized and did not know how to run.” Their job was made easier by an arrogant
George III who refused any efforts at compromise.

“By the
end of the Revolution, writes Lefer “Americans were toppling old patterns of
deference as relentlessly as gilded statues of King George. A new world of
greater social mobility and political participation was rapidly coming into
being. And while hostility to the rich continued to exist, the changes taking
place in American society were far more democratic than radical. It wasn’t that
the lower classes wanted to limit wealth. It was that they too now demanded the
right to earn it.”

It was the
belief among the conservative Founders that large-scale capitalism would be the
engine that drove America to greatness. They were right.

Of those
who met in private and in secrecy to draft a Constitution to replace the
Articles of Confederation, “thirty-nine were lawyers and judges. Two were
college presidents, and three were or had been professors. Almost half had
served in the Continental Army or the militia…American conservatives were well
represented at the convention.”

The
threats to the new republic were not so different then as they are today and
the future of the United States of America was no more in question then as now.

Its Ironic that your basiclaly casitng the Loyalists, and Kign Gorge, in the riolw of modern Liberals, with a beleif in Unlimited Government, no such thing as Individual Rights, and of coruse a rejection fo Capitalism, since the Realityis the Government was smaller and had fewer restructions on eithwr individual Rights or the Marketpl;ace under the Crown Government than under the New Republic.

By the way, King Gworge was a COnstitutional Mpnarch, not an absolute one, and the idea of a Constitutionally Limited Government is a British one, not uniquely American, and Indivisual Rughts were protected in English COmmon LAw...

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.